Are video games and Marvel as important as Trump coverage? Yup.
Want a broad, diverse audience? Deliver diverse content.
In the midst of the Trump presidency, The Washington Post’s leaders correctly identified that its readership’s unique fixation with the president (you love him, you hate him, you still read about him) would likely wane with his departure from office. Thus, preparations were made for a post-Trump world where The Post couldn’t depend on one subject to provide such a wellspring of traffic.
The strategic plan was deemed “Operation Skyfall” and its goal was to diversify The Post’s content beyond politics, to use that traffic bonanza as a runway to build up new coverage areas where The Post could establish authority and pick up the slack once Trump’s presidency concluded.
I was not privy to those high-level discussions, but I was involved in the plan’s implementation. It was during this time that The Post debuted The Lily, a vertical focused on women’s issues, as well as Voraciously (focused on food recipes) and By The Way, which features useful (and amusing) travel tips and guides from locals living in high-demand destinations. Launcher, covering the video game industry and gaming culture, joined the lineup of sub-brands in 2019.
This expansion all unfolded under the leadership of Marty Baron and Emilio Garcia-Ruiz. The latter, who was not cast in a major Hollywood film, served as the managing editor overseeing The Post’s digital content before leaving in 2020 to become the editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle. It was to Emilio that I submitted my idea for the Sports department to start developing coverage around esports in 2017. Emilio’s message back to me: Think bigger.
Instead of adding another beat that might compete for space on the Sports page, I was encouraged to think in terms of a new site, like The Lily. Part of the reason was a desire to further diversify The Post’s content offerings in a big, highly visible way that would be readily apparent not only to readers but to advertisers. Both The Lily and By The Way had secured lucrative launch sponsors and we wanted to court similar advertiser interest with what would become Launcher.
If you read a lot of media news, you likely see the similarities to a strategy The New York Times began years earlier and continues to successfully execute. Yes, there’s The Grey Lady, with all the news fit to print, but there’s also the NYT Crossword Puzzle, their renowned recipe archive, and in 2016 the Times acquired consumer product review site Wirecutter. The Times didn’t want to be just a newspaper, it aspired to become a lifestyle publication. With one subscription, readers could check multiple boxes for interesting and useful content: News, diversions, cooking and making smart purchases. Later, the Times added The Athletic to augment (and eventually replace) their sports coverage.
There is much wisdom in this approach. Not only is content diversity critical to developing a large and loyal readership, as we touched on Friday, but utilitarian content (like product reviews) or evergreen content (like recipes) can help sustain traffic even during the proverbial “slow news day.” It can also combat the dreaded “news fatigue,” as we also discussed last week.
Coverage diversity to engage with audiences is hardly new. It’s the reason newspapers added different departmental coverages centuries ago. But what can get lost amid that departmental segmentation is the consideration of audience diversity and what types of coverage are important to different consumers. If you’re writing sports and arts stories for the same type of reader you’re addressing with your news stories, you’re not really diversifying your audience, are you?
This is where those tasked with story and content assignments need to recognize the balance between the news consumers need vs. the news consumers want. It is easy to focus on the former because the imperative of those stories is obvious: Coverage of hot wars, elections, pandemics, calamitous weather, etc., is vital to the public’s safety and security. In other areas of the newsroom (Sports, lifestyle, etc.) there needs to be more attention to what their readers actually crave — and delivering that content in a way befitting the publication.
A lot of editors decide story assignments based on what they think is interesting. That’s all well and good, and a lot of editors hold those positions because they exercise sound story judgement. But crucially, to drive traffic and subscriptions, those editors need to think about what their audience thinks is interesting. And when an outlet wants to grow its readership, it is imperative to think about what the potential audience believes is interesting.
Friday I noted I booted up fantasy football coverage at The Post because there is massive interest from sports fans in that topic. There was an audience growth opportunity there. Some financial figures help illustrate two other audience opportunities around massively popular properties, particularly for young content consumers: superhero movies and video games, two pillars of nerd culture coverage.
From 2010-2020, 14 of the 30 top-grossing movies were superhero flicks. Add in the three newest main line Star Wars movies (Episodes VII-IX) and you get a majority. Then consider that revenue from the video game industry dwarfs Hollywood’s annual box office (link to, like, every video games business story ever here …). Sure seems there could be some interest in this area of nerd culture, no?
Back to Project Skyfall. In creating all these new verticals, no one at The Post was saying that Launcher’s coverage of Elden Ring was vital to the preservation of democracy. (In fact, we made t-shirts tweaking The Post’s slogan that read “Democracy Dies In Dark Souls” on the back.) But it is important in serving a young audience The Post and other media sites badly want to attract. If sites want these types of users, they have to give them something they want. Do it well, do it with care, show the audience you understand them, and publishers can reap the rewards of a growing, diverse audience.
On the night of the 2019 Game Awards (the video game version of the Oscars), Launcher’s live blog of the event surpassed The Post’s live blog of the Trump impeachment hearings in concurrent readers. Two totally different topics, two totally different audiences, both producing big traffic numbers. Isn’t that the ideal?
Launcher’s coverage never included super hero movies, but the lesson of how such coverage can be valuable is visible there, too.
The Post was already producing bang-on coverage of Marvel movies from a pair of reporters deeply versed in the comic book world, David Betancourt and Michael Cavna. Oftentimes even simple stories, like an explainer from Betancourt about a Marvel post-credits scene, would deliver significant readership (particularly when paired with a hysterical headline like this one).
Having writers who are deeply knowledgeable about their coverage area, and the audience in that coverage area, not only helps with the creation of resonant articles but it also demonstrates another key trait for audience development: authenticity. In terms of video game coverage, the Times had stubbed its toes repeatedly by having reporters parachute into a topic for which it was clear the reporter was an outsider, writing about gaming as though it were some weird cultural phenomenon and not a mainstream form of entertainment.
Those well-versed in a topic are more capable of gaining the audience’s trust and loyalty. Moreover, when a news event pushes that subject into the spotlight, those reporters are well positioned to write with authority and utilize the sourcing network they’ve developed, yielding a much stronger finished product than an outlet coming at the topic from the outside.
When Betancourt wrote about the cancelation of “Batgirl” by Warner Bros., providing nuance and context around the news, it became one of the top-read stories on the site. When the world of comics and politics overlapped — after Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, spouted off on race relations — Cavna’s collaboration with Samantha Cherry soared to the top of the traffic charts, thanks in part to Cavna getting Adams on the record with his first post-controversy comments.
All of this coverage helped fuel The Post’s success by driving audience and diversifying its content to demonstrate it wasn’t just “all politics, all the time.” (Yeah, the Dilbert story was about politics, but The Post wouldn’t have had the sourcing to get quotes from Scott Adams without Cavna’s background in comics.)
In Launcher’s case, the overwhelming majority of that new audience was under the age of 40. Even as the rest of the newsroom started to see its traffic sag after Trump’s departure from the White House, Launcher’s traffic grew year-over-year in 2022 — despite our most-read writer, Gene Park, missing much of that year recovering from cancer.
Regrettably, these successes at The Post were ultimately undermined by the company’s declining revenue in late 2022 through 2023. Launcher was shuttered in March of 2023, with only Gene remaining to cover video games. Betancourt and Cavna departed with me during the voluntary December buyouts. The other sub-brands launched under Operation Skyfall have been folded back into different parts of the newsroom, though The Post also continues to cover those topics, and By The Way’s branding is still featured on Post travel stories. Still, the value of diverse coverage and how The Post acquired demographically diverse users remains instructive.
In order to capture young users, you have to meet them where they are, and engage on their terms. Give them a reason to come by covering topics in which they’re interested and then, through a continued commitment to diverse coverage, showing them you care about the those topics in the same way they do.
There are gains to be made here by smart publishers. Case in point, take this recent push alert from that lifestyle company, the New York Times, which has subsequently ramped up its video game coverage:
Sing it with me now, parents … One of these things is not like the other ones! And when it comes to diversifying your audience, that is a very, very good thing.
Coming Wednesday: Games are a godsend for the news industry
Hi, I’m Mike. I’m a former editor for The Washington Post and ESPN. In 2024 I founded and now operate Launcher, LLC, a digital media consultancy operating out of Arlington, Va. Want to work together? Reach out on LinkedIn.